


Single Steps

by Nemhaine42



Series: Single Steps [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Darcy Lewis is Tony Stark's Daughter, Gen, Tony has no idea what he's doing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-21
Updated: 2014-02-26
Packaged: 2018-01-13 05:55:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1215196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemhaine42/pseuds/Nemhaine42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every journey begins with a single step. What may seem to change nothing might, in fact, be the first step to changing everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was significantly more difficult to write than first anticipated.

Puente Antiguo was a mess, no matter which way you looked at it.  Half the streets were ripped up and lots of places had no power. But people still needed to get stuff done, and one of the bars that remained unscathed had offered take-out food for people without electricity or, you know, giant holes in their houses. There was a double chicken sandwich and fries sitting with Clint’s name on it in a bag on the seat next to him. The only reason he was still in a parking lot opposite the bar - not eating his sandwich - was that Darcy Lewis was in the line, waiting on her order. Dr Foster had dropped her off to get food, and she was going to walk back up the road to the lab. It was a five minute stroll, tops. But Clint had been put under orders to monitor her until she got there safe. Coulson and the others had headed back to base and left him in the SUV to stew. He understood, of course, why she needed watching; it wasn’t every day something like that got sprung on them. He’d spent a good deal of time on the phone with Natasha checking it out. But she couldn’t find anything on Darcy Lewis on her end so they just had to watch her until answers made themselves clearer.

 

Finally Lewis stepped out of the bar, shivering a little since night had sucked the desert heat away. He’d have to move the car when she got closer to the lab but he could easily watch her without actually driving anywhere so at least it was an easy gig. But Darcy didn’t head right out onto the street, she checked behind her and put her hand in her pocket, clutching that taser of hers. She looked spooked and on edge, and her eyes darted around looking for something or somebody. Even though there were no lights on in his car, and he’d parked as far away from a working street light as he could, Darcy still seemed to pick his vehicle out of the dark and, with another glance behind, she strode in his direction.  Clint didn’t have to wait long to find out what was making Lewis so twitchy: two trucker types, around his own age, followed her out and started climbing into a beat-up looking white pick-up.

 

“Hey, sweetheart, we’ll give you a ride home,” one of them yelled, “you don’t wanna be walking through town in all this mess, huh?”

 

Darcy kept walking and turned her head to respond but since it wasn’t sleazy hollering he didn’t hear. Whatever it was, it didn’t put the guys off and, as soon as Darcy had crossed to Clint’s side of the road, the pick-up moved out and parked by the sidewalk.

 

“You’re one of them science chicks working out of the old showroom, right?” the guy leered out of the window, “I like nerdy girls.”

 

“Good for you,” Darcy said, clearly afraid and full of a desire to be anywhere but here. Clint thought maybe she was going for a route through smaller back streets where it’d be harder for the truck to follow as she walked briskly through the parking lot. But she didn’t turn off anywhere and strode right up to the passenger side door of his SUV. Because he’d left it unlocked Darcy was able to swing straight into the car. She left the carrier bag of food at her feet, beamed a rather unconvincing smile at him and leaned forward.

 

“Play along,” she whispered through her teeth. She put her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him down for a kiss. He felt freshly applied balm on her lips and she smelled like cool night air. It was not at all unpleasant, something he was pretty sure he was going to omit when he reported to Coulson. The inside lights had come one when she’d opened the door, so the sleaze-balls in the truck had a brightly lit view. They heard the truck tyres crunch in the dirt on the road as it drove off, so Darcy pulled back and slumped into her seat with her eyes wildly looking around the parking lot.

 

“You’ve got a gun in here, right?” she asked to which he nodded and moved his hand to the pistol in its holster on his leg.

 

“Great. I might need a ride, if that’s cool. But let’s just stay here for a while in case Beavis and Butthead come back.”

 

“How’d you know this was a SHIELD vehicle?” he asked. The car was unmarked and, after a few days in the desert, was about as coated in dust and dirt as every other car in the lot.

 

“Black SUV, with tinted windows and Nevada plates?” she said with a raised eyebrow, “Not all that many of those around here before SHIELD turned up. Plus I recognised your plate number from before. I memorised a bunch of ‘em.”

 

She’d memorised their licence plates? She was just a bit too savvy for a civilian and the reason Coulson had given instructions to keep an eye on her came to mind. He supposed if he now had to write up a report detailing why it’d been necessary to make out with her, she could fill in some of the gaps. It wasn’t exactly gallant of him but he was still on the clock so screw it.

 

“Right. But, uh, quid pro quo, Lewis.” he said, “I save you from the redneck brothers and you see if you can answer something for me.”

 

She looked at him suspiciously and he was sure he saw her hand slide back into her pocket for the taser. Clint was amazed Coulson hadn’t confiscated it yet, she was so eager to use it again.

 

“You know we do background checks, right?”

 

“Yeah…”

 

“Criminal records, employment history, _birth certificates_?”

 

“So…”

 

“So, there’s nothing in any of those things that might look a little weird to us?”

 

“Like what?” she asked. A less experienced agent might have fallen for her poker face. But Clint could see she knew exactly what he was trying to get at and just wanted him to say it.

 

“Like the fact that you’re Tony Stark’s daughter,” he said. It wasn’t a question and she sagged in disgruntled defeat, “It was extra weird considering our contact couldn’t find any mention of you at all on Stark’s end.”

 

“Well they wouldn’t because Tony Stark doesn’t actually know I exist,” she said, more as a matter of fact than something she was bitter about. It certainly explained why Natasha hadn’t even heard of anyone called Darcy Lewis or any mention of a daughter when she was undercover at Stark Industries. But absolutely no-one else seemed to know, how had it been so thoroughly kept under wraps?

 

“And you never thought about… I don’t know, doing something about that? Going looking for him?” he asked.

 

“What for? Okay, boo hoo, I didn’t grow up in a mansion in Malibu but my life doesn’t suck that much: my mom’s a doctor. Besides, I get the impression he’s more trouble than he’s worth.”

 

“You might be right there. Doesn’t anyone ever mention it?”

 

“Well, my name’s not Stark, it’s Lewis. Anybody that sees my birth certificate just assumes there must be some other guy called Anthony Stark wandering around and leaves it alone. Like you can’t be the only Clint Barton in the world.”

 

She didn’t sound or look like she was lying, so Clint left it at that. There had been no sign of the white truck returning so he started up the car and headed for Foster’s lab, completing his good deed for the day and looking forward to that sandwich of his. At the end of the short ride, he noticed Darcy looked pensive and, when he pulled over, she fixed him with a serious look.

 

“I guess you’ll have to put all this in some report, right?” she asked.

 

“Them’s the rules, kid. Although I, uh, I’ll probably go easy on the kissing thing. If you want.”

 

“I don’t really care about that. But if you want to do me a favour you can classify the shit out of the Tony Stark thing. I’ve never told anyone else. I’d kinda like to keep it that way.”

 

“I’ll do what I can,” he said sincerely. He couldn’t promise her anything, not if Coulson or Hill or Fury decided it wasn’t going to happen. She gave him a curt nod in return and hopped out of the car without looking back. He stayed until she was inside and he saw an upstairs light come on. He turned the car but kept his eyes on the wing mirror, in which he could see the front bumper of a white pick-up poking out from a side street. He wondered how good a story he’d have to come up with for Coulson to let him off with shooting their tyres.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Tony wasn’t exactly sure why he chose to fund Jane Foster’s research. Part of it was a one-up on SHIELD, who clearly weren’t doing enough to keep Foster sweet judging by the speed at which she’d accepted his offer. Another part was that it felt neater, having everything vaguely Avengers related in one place. Everybody kept heading off in different directions, so having a home base to come back to felt right. He’d just wanted to do a little recon on the young astrophysicist and her assistant so he’d requested copies of their files from SHIELD. They weren’t really all that interesting, nothing he didn’t already know or couldn’t have guessed. Foster was a veritable genius and rivalled Tony for being able to scrape leftover technology together and make it work. And while he knew that her theories about an Einstein-Rosen bridge across space were legit and only a few good doses of lab work away from being reality, it wasn’t really held in high regard in the scientific community yet. A thin veneer of crackpot but nothing illegal, nothing scandalous. Unless you counted all the lip-lock with the God of Thunder, which he didn’t.

 

The assistant, on the other hand, proved more of an anomaly. After tasering a man she’d just helped to run over, she’d hacked the DMV to forge an ID for Thor in order to help smuggle him out of SHIELD’s clutches. She’d also made similar mincemeat of the firewall at an observatory in Norway, just to live stream footage of the Battle of New York. Jane Foster kept her on as an assistant after her internship ended because she was good at using and programming database software, as well as cohesively cataloguing and organising readings and research. But that was not what caught Tony’s interest. He’d seen her, both of them actually, when they arrived at the tower the day before and Darcy Lewis was maddeningly familiar. He just couldn’t put his finger on why.  

 

“JARVIS, bring up Lewis’ background information.”

 

He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He knew she was from California and studied at Culver and neither of those things helped. There was a painfully normal childhood, nothing crazy at all, and very little chance for them to have crossed paths previously. He flicked his finger over the projected screens, switching to see information about Darcy’s family. Maybe she was related to someone he knew. He just dearly hoped she wasn’t some baby cousin of Justin Hammer or anything. Tony cocked his head at what he saw. Her mother was listed as a Dr Kerry Lewis, which did ring a couple of bells, but her father… where her father’s name ought to have been, it was marked ‘classified’. Which made absolutely no sense. Who on Earth was her father that he needed to be classified? These were secure files from SHIELD, how much more classified could something get? Then again, he had asked for these files and let SHIELD have the chance to remove anything extra sensitive. But he did have another option.

 

When he’d broken into SHIELD’s system on the helicarrier, he’d had JARVIS copy over some personal files for his fellow Avengers. Knowledge was power, wasn’t it? Dr Foster’s and Miss Lewis’ had come along with Thor’s and he hadn’t paid them much attention at the time. He kept the files in a usb drive in his desk, even though they were now out of date they were still files SHIELD didn’t know (or pretended not to know) he’d taken. He retrieved the drive and accessed the older files for comparison. They didn’t include anything after the Chitauri invasion and it was all much and such the same as before, although Barton’s name cropped up at the bottom as the agent who’d written most of this up. Lewis was noted to have identified a SHIELD car in a dark parking lot and flagged it down for a ride when a couple of bozos followed her out of a bar. But none of this had anything to do with her parents. He switched to the family section and froze.

 

Every part of his body seemed to stop.

 

He blinked slowly and deliberately, as if doing so might change what was in front of him.

 

It was _his_ name.

 

Anthony Edward Stark was listed as the father of Darcy Lewis.

 

No… that… was that possible?

 

Yes, okay. It was perfectly possible, Darcy was at least twenty years younger than him. The file came with a scan of her birth certificate, on which his name also appeared. What were the chances of there being another Anthony Stark out there? It wasn’t actually such a ridiculous concept but that probably wouldn’t require classification. There was a fuzzy thought in his head about whether he’d be able to run DNA in-house or not as he clicked to bring up more information about her mother, this time accompanied by a photograph.

 

Definitely possible. Kerry Lewis had studied at MIT and graduated the year he’d been asked to give a keynote speech. It wasn’t the clearest of memories but she’d definitely been there, at whatever party he’d gone to afterwards. He could see her face in his mind’s eye, even though he couldn’t remember her voice nor anything that actually happened. Darcy resembled her mother a lot. They had the same eyes, the same mouth, skin tone, similar height and figure. But her hair was darker, she had a different nose, a different chin. The more Tony looked at Darcy’s picture the more he realised why she was so familiar. That was _his_ nose and _his_ chin. It was still possible that it wasn’t true; just because Kerry Lewis _thought_ that Tony was Darcy’s father didn’t mean he actually was. He could still run DNA. But he was probably kidding himself there. He saw himself in her face and could never erase it from his mind.  He was her _father_. Her dad. He had a daughter. It sounded so weird in his head.

 

Didn’t she know? It was on her birth certificate, she had to know. But she seemed to have no intention of mentioning it. Should he bring it up? Tony had no idea what to do. He wasn’t actually all that good at people. The thought of having a child had always terrified him. He had no reference point for what a good father was supposed to be like, and he never wanted to run the risk of repeating his own father’s screw ups. Screwing _somebody_ up. Parents didn’t get to go back to the drawing board or review their math and make changes. There was no Mark II.  But Darcy wasn’t a child. She was a grown, fully self-sufficient person. One who had likely gone through her entire life knowing who her father was while totally out of reach. She’d have seen photos or news reports of him and known. She came to the tower with Jane Foster, she shook his hand _knowing. What was he supposed to do?_ He didn’t think he could move from his seat, or even take his eyes off her picture. It struck him as a little silly: she was somewhere in the building but he was staring at her photo in a government agency’s file.

 

He opened the live security footage and found her on the common area couch, playfully flicking popcorn at Clint’s smirking face only for him to catch it in mid-air.  There she was, relaxed and smiling. His daughter. On his couch. In his house. She’d found her way home without any help from him whatsoever. And she was _beautiful_. Darcy lounged around on the sofa with Jane and Thor like it was no big deal. She used JARVIS’s browser interface like she’d been doing it her whole life. She wiggled her toes in the cushions, and wrinkled her nose when she laughed. She was his little girl and he wanted to look at her forever.

 

And that’s how Pepper found him three hours later, staring at a vast wall of screens displaying several windows of recorded security footage as well as the live feed simultaneously.

 

“Tony? Steve just got back from DC, aren’t you going to come upstairs and say hi?”

 

He knew Steve was back. He’d watched him saunter into the living area and introduce himself to Darcy and Jane. He’d watched Darcy bite her lip and run her eyes all over the Captain. And he’d watched unhappily as Steve had settled in on the couch right next to his daughter. He’d only just found her: he didn’t want to look at Steve giving her that stupid lopsided grin and making her laugh.

 

“Tony? What are you doing?” Pepper asked from behind him, sounding deeply concerned, “What is all this?”

 

He could probably guess that a giant spread of images and video of a young woman who only just moved into their home would probably look odd. Really odd. Marginally crazy and stalker-ish. Some explanation would be required. He scrambled around in his brain for words but everything sounded so pathetic, so unbelievable. He switched back to the tab showing Darcy’s birth certificate.

 

“Is that…?” Pepper gasped, “is that real? W-wait, _that’s_ why it said ‘classified’?”

 

“Yah-huh,” he said, while Pepper sank heavily onto a stool next to him.

 

“So where did you… Did you hack SHIELD? Again?”

 

“Uh, technically I got these files the first time... so there’s no ‘again’.”

 

Tony brought the live feed back up to fill the whole screen and resumed his attempt to commit every detail of his daughter’s face to memory.

 

“She’s my baby girl, Pep,” he said. Why did his voice sound so choked up? Why did his chest feel so tight?

 

“She’s twenty-three, Tony.”

 

“Twenty-three?” he spun around in his chair to the back of the room, “Hey, Dum-E. You hear that? She’s younger than you, she’s your baby sister.” It also meant she’d been born just before his parents had died, which sort of made him feel relieved that he hadn’t known at the time. There was no way he’d have handled that.

 

“Tony, this is serious. Did you want to get a paternity test?” Pepper said quietly, as if talking any louder would shatter the moment and all hell would break loose.

 

“The dates work out, I kind of remember her mother. I can do the test but I don’t think it’s going to change anything.”

 

“So what do you want to do. How are you going to tell her? Tell the others?”

 

“Uh, if it’s on her birth certificate she probably already knows. And since Barton wrote up her file, I guess he does too. For now, just do nothing.”

 

“Nothing? Don’t you want to... get to know her?” She sounded like she was on the brink of tears. He turned his head stiffly to look at her and felt the lump in his throat all the more.

 

“I don’t think I’ve wanted anything so much before. But look at her, Pepper. She’s happy. I don’t… I don’t want to spoil it yet. Let her and Foster find their feet and, after a while, we’ll figure something out.”

 

For once, Tony got the feeling Pepper didn’t really know how to handle this either. She had the same awed expression as she too watched Darcy’s image on screen, seeing the young woman in a different light. He felt Pepper’s hand on his and gripped on with his own, squeezing tight.

 

“She’s got my nose, right?”

  
“And your chin.”


	3. Chapter 3

Steve and Darcy were _baking_.

 

Actually baking.

 

They were baking cookies, apparently as an excuse to make as much mess as humanly possible. There was melted chocolate all over the place, flour in their hair and Tony could have sworn at one point he saw Steve smear dough onto Darcy’s cheek. Their exuberant laughter carried quite a long way so Tony was forced to hole up in his workshop to avoid it. He didn’t want to begrudge them their fun but over the last few weeks he’d developed a severe distaste for watching Cap and Darcy being so… buddy-buddy.  Tony was her father, he should know her like Steve was coming to know her. He wanted to know her better. But he didn’t. Since finding his child right under his nose, he hadn’t done a damn thing to approach her. Instead he kept watch on the live security feeds. He knew it was pretty gutless, he just couldn’t bear to make life in the tower awkward for her. Pepper was being as supportive as she could but the responsibility was his and his alone, which utterly terrified him.

 

“You can’t chicken out of it forever, Tony. You gotta talk to her.”

 

Okay, so he’d done one thing: told Rhodey. Which he was quickly regretting since Rhodey took it upon himself to constantly prod Tony into doing something, and was currently chasing him around the workshop as Tony fiddled pointlessly with car parts.

 

“I’m not chickening out, I’m… biding my time.”

 

“The longer you leave it, the worse it’s going to get because she’ll want to know why you put it off.”

 

“And I’ll tell her: her father’s a stinking coward.”

 

“You’re not a coward.”

 

“But I _am_ a chicken?”

 

“Stop avoiding this, Tony. You’ve got a wonderful daughter - and I know, I’ve talked to her - she’s smart and funny and kind and she’s upstairs. She’s right here, quit ignoring her.”

 

“I’m not ignoring her. I’m…” He was what? Protecting her? Protecting her from the inevitable shitstorm that came from life with Tony Stark? Protecting her from the day he turned into his own father and hurt her? Rhodey was right: Darcy was wonderful and he was proud of the confident smart alec she’d turned out to be. He didn’t want to taint any of that. Just thinking about the train wreck his life used to be made him want to hide from her forever. She needed someone who wasn’t just figuring out how this stability thing worked, she needed someone who knew how to be selfless, who knew how to treat her right. Really, he ought to be pretty happy that she spent so much time around Steve, who embodied all those things. But Darcy shouldn’t have had to go looking for those things, her father should have been doing it. Tony wanted to be that guy.

 

“Tony, nobody’s expecting you to suddenly be ‘father of the year’. You don’t need to pack her lunches or vet her boyfriends. Just start by being her friend, isn’t that what you want?”

 

“I want to do it _right_ , Rhodey!” Tony snapped, spinning to look Rhodey in the eyes, “I want to be the one she calls when she’s upset or wants someone to pick her up when she’s drunk or when she just wants to goof off. I want to be her _dad_ like I should have always been. But it’s too late.”

 

“It’s never too late, Tony,” Rhodey said, much softer than his own mildly panicked voice, and darted his eyes towards the stairs behind them. When he turned around Tony saw Darcy standing on the bottom step, holding a plate of cookies and with a startled look in her eyes.  A small part of him felt slightly relieved; his hand had been forced and he didn’t have to work out how to approach her, but there was no more time to prepare, and no cards to read off of.

 

“You… you heard all that?” Tony asked, cringing and wondering how his voice still worked. She nodded imperceptibly and slowly stepped off the staircase and over to the work bench looking everywhere but at him.

 

“I came to see if you guys wanted cookies. Homemade. By Steve, mostly. I helped. I licked the bowl,” she said, smiling awkwardly.  This was what Tony had been dreading: that they’d be so unsure of each other, and what to do, that it ruined the whole idea. Although apparently Rhodey knew exactly what he was going to do.

 

“Oh, thank you. They look great. I’m going to eat them upstairs and you two can have a nice talk,” he said, grabbing the small plate and zipping back up the stairs. He made a couple of encouraging nudging movements with his head and mouthed ‘good luck’ just before disappearing through the door.

 

“Was it Clint?” Darcy asked, her eyes trying very hard to meet his but always flitting away again.

 

“What?”

 

“Was it Clint that told you?”

 

“Oh, no. It wasn’t… I, uh, I might have broken into some secure servers and taken some files from SHIELD,” he said, he wished he had something to do with his hands, “I guess that makes you a chip off the old block, huh?”

 

She didn’t respond but finally met his eyes; where Tony was nervous and unsure, Darcy was afraid. Watching her on a screen had been powerful enough but here, right in front of him, all her emotions were undiluted and it was all the more intense. He didn’t think he could stand the thought that it was _him_ making her scared.

 

“I’m sorry,” he said without thinking.

 

“For what?”

 

“For not knowing. For not… being… there, I guess.”

    

“It’s not your fault. It’s not… I mean it doesn’t have to be…” she started, this timid Darcy was really yanking at his heartstrings. Where was the bright and cheeky Darcy from upstairs?

 

“I didn’t come here to meet you,” she forced out, “I came here to work with Jane, so… so if you don’t want to do anything then… then that’s okay.”

 

“Is that what you want?” Please don’t let that be what she wants.

 

She made some uncertain, indecisive noises and fidgeted anxiously with the ends of her hair. If she really wanted to pretend none of this ever happened, he’d do it but he thought it might just kill something inside him. He didn’t want their relationship to be like his had been with Howard. He didn’t want Darcy to think she couldn’t be important to him, that he didn’t care, that she wasn’t good enough.

 

_'What is, and always will be, my greatest creation is you.’_ His father had been dead for nearly 20 years by the time Tony heard that; it had felt amazing, unbelievable, and Darcy had been waiting just as long.

 

“I’m not good at this,” he said, “But I want to try. If you’ll let me. I…” he took a deep breath and gingerly cupped his hand on her jaw, brushing her cheek with his thumb, “I don’t want to let you slip through my fingers, baby girl.”

 

Darcy’s eyes widened and he saw tears welling up. She let out a relieved burst of laughter and nodded, “Okay.”

 

Tony felt a wall inside him break and pulled her into a tight hug. She’d said okay. She wasn’t going anywhere. He had his daughter. He could smell her hair, hear her breath and feel her hands clutching onto the back of his shirt; it was like sensory overload and he thought he might burst. They each let out a shaky laugh when they parted, and Darcy pulled her phone out of her pocket.

 

“We can swap numbers,” she said, sniffling and  gesturing for him to give her his phone, “so we can call or text or whatever.”

 

“Snapchat?”

 

“You have a Snapchat?”

 

“I can get a Snapchat,” he said and gladly handed his cell over, watching her tap away, “I’ll get you anything you want. You’ve got student loans, right? They can disappear.”

 

She looked sorely tempted by that, “I’ll think about it.”

 

“Well, in the meantime: JARVIS?”

 

“Yes, sir?”

 

“I want you to give Darcy access to all our systems. Same as Pepper.”

 

Darcy’s head shot up from looking at their phones, “ _What?!_ Wait, you don’t have to… I don’t nee-”

 

“Too late, already did it,” he shrugged, “Beside, you never know when it might come in handy.”

 

“Thanks, Tony.” she said, “I _can_ call you Tony, right?”

 

“You can call me whatever you want.”

 

Darcy snorted with laughter, “Okay, JARVIS is one thing but don’t give me that kind of power. Steve thinks my nicknames are almost as dumb as yours.”

 

Actually his nicknames were awesome but he ignored that, “You like Steve, huh?”

 

“Sure, I like Steve. He’s cool. We’re friends. Why?”

 

“No reason.”

 

“Yeah, sure. Anyway, I guess I’ve been down here long enough to get out of dish duty,” she said. She handed him back his phone with a warm smile, “message me if you want to hang out, okay?”

  
“I’ll hold you to it, kid,” he said. He watched her head back up the stairs and only when she was out of sight did he look down at his phone. The entry for ‘Darcy Lewis’ didn’t have a picture yet, something he’d make sure to rectify, but for now he changed her contact name to ‘Baby Girl’. 


End file.
